Abstract

Many studies have shown that the readability of health documents presented to consumers does not match their reading levels. An accurate assessment of the readability of health-related texts is an important step in providing material that match readers' literacy. Current readability measurements depend heavily on text analysis (NLP), but neglect style (text layout). In this study, we show that style properties are important predictors of documents’ readability. In particular, we build an automated computer program that uses documents' styles to predict their readability score. The scores produced by our system were tested against scores given by human experts. Our tool shows stronger correlation to experts’ scores than the Flesch-Kincaid readability grading method.